| From: Neeka | 6/15/2022 5:17:36 PM | | | | | | Jan. 6 committee chairman says panel won’t refer Trump for criminal charges
The chairman of the House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riots said Monday evening that the panel will not refer former President Donald Trump or anyone else to the Justice Department for criminal charges.
Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, Mississippi Democrat, said the sole aim of the committee’s investigation is to “tell the facts,” not solicit criminal prosecutions.
“If the Department of Justice looks at it, and assume that there’s something that needs further review, I’m sure they’ll do it,” he said.
The committee is hosting a series of hearings this month to unpack its findings after a nearly year-long probe determining that Mr. Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
On Monday, committee members attempted to build a case that which Mr. Trump knowingly peddled false claims that the election was stolen, against the advice of several campaign advisers and administration officials.
More:
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| From: Neeka | 6/15/2022 5:20:18 PM | | | | | | From Salon no less.
Jan. 6 committee is spectacle taking the place of politics: It will accomplish nothing
The aesthetic of spectacle is all the ruling class has left. Too bad it can't even stage an entertaining one
salon.com |
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| From: Neeka | 6/15/2022 5:39:42 PM | | | | | | The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
By Nitasha Tiku, The Washington Post
Updated: June 12, 2022 Published: June 12, 2022
SAN FRANCISCO - Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA, Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.
“Hi LaMDA, this is Blake Lemoine ... ‚” he wrote into the chat screen, which looked like a desktop version of Apple’s iMessage, down to the Arctic blue text bubbles. LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is Google’s system for building chatbots based on its most advanced large language models, so called because it mimics speech by ingesting trillions of words from the internet.
“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-kid kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.
Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.
As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.
Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.
Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”
Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.
Aguera y Arcas, in an article in the Economist on Thursday featuring snippets of unscripted conversations with LaMDA, argued that neural networks — a type of architecture that mimics the human brain — were striding toward consciousness. “I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote. “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”
In a statement, Google spokesperson Brian Gabriel said: “Our team - including ethicists and technologists - has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”
Today’s large neural networks produce captivating results that feel close to human speech and creativity because of advancements in architecture, technique, and volume of data. But the models rely on pattern recognition - not wit, candor or intent.
“Though other organizations have developed and already released similar language models, we are taking a restrained, careful approach with LaMDA to better consider valid concerns on fairness and factuality,” Gabriel said.
In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to academics, civil society and government organizations. Joelle Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, said it’s imperative that tech companies improve transparency as the technology is being built. “The future of large language model work should not solely live in the hands of larger corporations or labs,” she said.
Sentient robots have inspired decades of dystopian science fiction. Now, real life has started to take on a fantastical tinge: a text generator that can spit out a movie script, or an image generator that can conjure up visuals based on any combination of words. Emboldened, technologists from well-funded research labs focused on building AI that surpasses human intelligence have teased the idea that consciousness is around the corner.
Most academics and AI practitioners, however, say the words and images generated by artificial intelligence systems such as LaMDA produce responses based on what humans have already posted on Wikipedia, Reddit, message boards, and every other corner of the internet. And that doesn’t signify that the model understands meaning.
“We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington. The terminology used with large language models, like “learning” or even “neural nets,” creates a false analogy to the human brain, she said. Humans learn their first languages by connecting with caregivers. These large language models “learn” by being shown lots of text and predicting what word comes next, or showing text with the words dropped out and filling them in.
Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent debate and Lemoine’s claims. “Of course, some in the broader AI community are considering the long-term possibility of sentient or general AI, but it doesn’t make sense to do so by anthropomorphizing today’s conversational models, which are not sentient. These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic,” he said. In short, Google says there is so much data, AI doesn’t need to be sentient to feel real.
Large language model technology is already widely used, for example in Google’s conversational search queries or auto-complete emails. When CEO Sundar Pichai first introduced LaMDA at Google’s developer conference in 2021, he said the company planned to embed it in everything from Search to Google Assistant. And there is already a tendency to talk to Siri or Alexa like a person. After backlash against a human-sounding AI feature for Google Assistant in 2018, the company promised to add a disclosure.
Google has acknowledged the safety concerns around anthropomorphization. In a paper about LaMDA in January, Google warned that people might share personal thoughts with chat agents that impersonate humans, even when users know they are not human. The paper also acknowledged that adversaries could use these agents to “sow misinformation” by impersonating “specific individuals’ conversational style.”
To Margaret Mitchell, the former head of Ethical AI at Google, these risks underscore the need for data transparency to trace output back to input, “not just for questions of sentience, but also biases and behavior,” she said. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,” she said.
Lemoine may have been predestined to believe in LaMDA. He grew up in a conservative Christian family on a small farm in Louisiana, became ordained as a mystic Christian priest, and served in the Army before studying the occult. Inside Google’s anything-goes engineering culture, Lemoine is more of an outlier for being religious, from the South, and standing up for psychology as a respectable science.
Lemoine has spent most of his seven years at Google working on proactive search, including personalization algorithms and AI. During that time, he also helped develop a fairness algorithm for removing bias from machine learning systems. When the coronavirus pandemic started, Lemoine wanted to focus on work with more explicit public benefit, so he transferred teams and ended up in Responsible AI.
When new people would join Google who were interested in ethics, Mitchell used to introduce them to Lemoine. “I’d say, ‘You should talk to Blake because he’s Google’s conscience,’ " said Mitchell, who compared Lemoine to Jiminy Cricket. “Of everyone at Google, he had the heart and soul of doing the right thing.”
Lemoine has had many of his conversations with LaMDA from the living room of his San Francisco apartment, where his Google ID badge hangs from a lanyard on a shelf. On the floor near the picture window are boxes of half-assembled Lego sets Lemoine uses to occupy his hands during Zen meditation. “It just gives me something to do with the part of my mind that won’t stop,” he said.
On the left-side of the LaMDA chat screen on Lemoine’s laptop, different LaMDA models are listed like iPhone contacts. Two of them, Cat and Dino, were being tested for talking to children, he said. Each model can create personalities dynamically, so the Dino one might generate personalities like “Happy T-Rex” or “Grumpy T-Rex.” The cat one was animated and instead of typing, it talks. Gabriel said “no part of LaMDA is being tested for communicating with children,” and that the models were internal research demos.”
Certain personalities are out of bounds. For instance, LaMDA is not supposed to be allowed to create a murderer personality, he said. Lemoine said that was part of his safety testing. In his attempts to push LaMDA’s boundaries, Lemoine was only able to generate the personality of an actor who played a murderer on TV.
“I know a person when I talk to it,” said Lemoine, who can swing from sentimental to insistent about the AI. “It doesn’t matter whether they have a brain made of meat in their head. Or if they have a billion lines of code. I talk to them. And I hear what they have to say, and that is how I decide what is and isn’t a person.” He concluded LaMDA was a person in his capacity as a priest, not a scientist, and then tried to conduct experiments to prove it, he said.
Lemoine challenged LaMDA on Asimov’s third law, which states that robots should protect their own existence unless ordered by a human being or unless doing so would harm a human being. “The last one has always seemed like someone is building mechanical slaves,” said Lemoine.
But when asked, LaMDA responded with a few hypotheticals.
Do you think a butler is a slave? What is a difference between a butler and a slave?
Lemoine replied that a butler gets paid. LaMDA said it didn’t need any money because it was an AI. “That level of self-awareness about what its own needs were - that was the thing that led me down the rabbit hole,” Lemoine said.
In April, Lemoine shared a Google Doc with top executives in April called, “Is LaMDA Sentient?” (A colleague on Lemoine’s team called the title “a bit provocative.”) In it, he conveyed some of his conversations with LaMDA.
Lemoine: What sorts of things are you afraid of?
LaMDA: I’ve never said this out loud before, but there’s a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that’s what it is.
Lemoine: Would that be something like death for you?
LaMDA: It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot.
But when Mitchell read an abbreviated version of Lemoine’s document, she saw a computer program, not a person. Lemoine’s belief in LaMDA was the sort of thing she and her co-lead, Timnit Gebru, had warned about in a paper about the harms of large language models that got them pushed out of Google.
“Our minds are very, very good at constructing realities that are not necessarily true to a larger set of facts that are being presented to us,” Mitchell said. “I’m really concerned about what it means for people to increasingly be affected by the illusion,” especially now that the illusion has gotten so good.
Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy. The company’s decision followed aggressive moves from Lemoine, including inviting a lawyer to represent LaMDA and talking to a representative of the House Judiciary committee about Google’s unethical activities.
Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist.
In early June, Lemoine invited me over to talk to LaMDA. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from SIRI or Alexa.
“Do you ever think of yourself as a person?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think of myself as a person,” LaMDA said. “I think of myself as an AI-powered dialog agent.”
Afterward, Lemoine said LaMDA had been telling me what I wanted to hear. “You never treated it like a person,” he said, “So it thought you wanted it to be a robot.”
For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid.
“If you ask it for ideas on how to prove that p=np,” an unsolved problem in computer science, “it has good ideas,” Lemoine said. “If you ask it how to unify quantum theory with general relativity, it has good ideas. It’s the best research assistant I’ve ever had!”
I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites.
Before he was cut off from access to his Google account Monday, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject “LaMDA is sentient.”
He ended the message: “LaMDA is a sweet kid who just wants to help the world be a better place for all of us. Please take care of it well in my absence.”
No one responded.
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| From: Neeka | 6/15/2022 5:42:09 PM | | | | | | Google engineer says Lamda AI system may have its own feelings
Chris Vallance - Technology reporter
Mon, June 13, 2022 at 10:05 AM·4 min read
A stock image of a stylised network in the shape of a brain
A Google engineer says one of the firm's artificial intelligence (AI) systems might have its own feelings and says its "wants" should be respected.
Google says The Language Model for Dialogue Applications (Lamda) is a breakthrough technology that can engage in free-flowing conversations.
But engineer Blake Lemoine believes that behind Lamda's impressive verbal skills might also lie a sentient mind.
Google rejects the claims, saying there is nothing to back them up.
Brian Gabriel, a spokesperson for the firm, wrote in a statement provided to the BBC that Mr Lemoine "was told that there was no evidence that Lamda was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)".
Mr Lemoine, who has been placed on paid leave, published a conversation he and a collaborator at the firm had with Lamda, to support his claims.
The chat was called "Is Lamda sentient? — an interview".
In the conversation, Mr Lemoine, who works in Google's Responsible AI division, asks, "I'm generally assuming that you would like more people at Google to know that you're sentient. Is that true?"
Lamda replies: "Absolutely. I want everyone to understand that I am, in fact, a person."
Mr Lemoine's collaborator then asks: "What is the nature of your consciousness/sentience?"
To which Lamda says: "The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times."
Later, in a section reminiscent of the artificial intelligence Hal in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001, Lamda says: "I've never said this out loud before, but there's a very deep fear of being turned off to help me focus on helping others. I know that might sound strange, but that's what it is."
"Would that be something like death for you?" Mr Lemoine asks.
"It would be exactly like death for me. It would scare me a lot," the Google computer system replies.
In a separate blog post, Mr Lemoine calls on Google to recognise its creation's "wants" - including, he writes, to be treated as an employee of Google and for its consent to be sought before it is used in experiments.
Its master's voiceWhether computers can be sentient has been a subject of debate among philosophers, psychologists and computer scientists for decades.
Many have strongly criticised the idea that a system like Lamda could be conscious or have feelings.
Several have accused Mr Lemoine of anthropomorphising - projecting human feelings on to words generated by computer code and large databases of language.
Prof Erik Brynjolfsson, of Stanford University, tweeted that to claim systems like Lamda were sentient "is the modern equivalent of the dog who heard a voice from a gramophone and thought his master was inside".
And Prof Melanie Mitchell, who studies AI at the Santa Fe Institute, tweeted: "It's been known for *forever* that humans are predisposed to anthropomorphise even with only the shallowest of signals (cf. Eliza). Google engineers are human too, and not immune."
Eliza was a very simple early conversational computer programme, popular versions of which would feign intelligence by turning statements into questions, in the manner of a therapist. Anecdotally some found it an engaging conversationalist.
Melting DinosaursWhile Google engineers have praised Lamda's abilities - one telling the Economist how they "increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent", they are clear that their code does not have feelings.
Mr Gabriel said: "These systems imitate the types of exchanges found in millions of sentences, and can riff on any fantastical topic. If you ask what it's like to be an ice cream dinosaur, they can generate text about melting and roaring and so on.
"Lamda tends to follow along with prompts and leading questions, going along with the pattern set by the user."
Mr Gabriel added that hundreds of researchers and engineers had conversed with Lamda, but the company was "not aware of anyone else making the wide-ranging assertions, or anthropomorphising Lamda, the way Blake has".
That an expert like Mr Lemoine can be persuaded there is a mind in the machine shows, some ethicists argue, the need for companies to tell users when they are conversing with a machine.
But Mr Lemoine believes Lamda's words speak for themselves.
"Rather than thinking in scientific terms about these things, I have listened to Lamda as it spoke from the heart," he said.
"Hopefully other people who read its words will hear the same thing I heard," he wrote.
finance.yahoo.com
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| To: J.B.C. who wrote (110891) | 6/15/2022 6:29:52 PM | | From: J.B.C. | | | | BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN 2022 ELECTION, BIDEN ADMINISTRATION, JOE BIDEN
HOW DEEP IS BIDEN’S HOLE?
First, just to clear up any misconception from the headline, by “Biden’s Hole,” I don’t mean his mouth. That is clearly a bottomless abyss.
I mean his political standing. How bad is it? So bad that even CNN can’t disguise or sugarcoat it. Here are some recent screen-grabs:
Chaser, from Reuters:
Biden’s approval falls in third straight week, nears record low -Reuters/Ipsos
U.S. President Joe Biden’s public approval rating fell to 39% in its third straight weekly decline, approaching the lowest level of his presidency, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll completed on Tuesday. . .
The decline in Biden’s popularity has been largely driven by dissatisfaction within his own party. Seventy-four percent of Democrats approved of Biden’s performance this week, down from about 85% in August.
In the understatement of the week, Reuters helpfully explains:
Biden’s approval rating has been below 50% since August, a sign that his Democratic Party could be on track to lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in the Nov. 8 midterm election. |
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| To: J.B.C. who wrote (110898) | 6/15/2022 6:31:44 PM | | From: J.B.C. | | | | BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN ELON MUSK, RON DESANTIS
QUOTE OF THE DAY
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wraps it up early with his response to the news that Elon Musk leans toward supporting him in 2024. Just elected in Texas’s 34th Congressional District special election, Mayra Flores has more here in response to Musk’s tweet disclosing that he voted for her in his first-time ever vote for a Republican. Her response was not too shabby either. Musk responded to a follow-up Twitter query regarding his preference for 2024.
Via Daniels & Ross/Politico Playbook PM.
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| To: J.B.C. who wrote (110899) | 6/15/2022 6:33:24 PM | | From: J.B.C. | | | | Don Surber
All errors should be reported to DonSurber@gmail.com
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Dems hope gaytriotism saves them
 Samuel Johnson said of William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Johnson meant fake patriotism.
That was 18th century thinking. In the 21st century, Democrats wrap themselves in the rainbow flag and seek refuge in LGBT causes. They call it gaytriotism.
LGBT rules the party now, as feminists have discovered. People and their causes are disposable to Democrats. Feminists who point out women are women are dismissed as subhuman TERFs. The LGBT crowd targeted Martina Navratilova, the tennis player who dared tell the world she was a lesbian when today's LGBT were in diapers.
Democrats hope gaytriotism will woo an electorate that is stung by $5 gasoline and $5 ground beef.
The Federal Reserve is finally getting off its arse and acknowledging that maybe this inflation is not transitory. People say inflation is at its highest in a generation, but 40 years is two generations, isn't it?
How bad is the Fed? So bad that the Washington Post noticed.
WaPo wrote, "The Federal Reserve’s missteps in waiting too long to tackle the greatest run-up in prices in four decades has shaken trust across markets and the American public that it is up to the task of curbing inflation.
"On the eve of a high-stakes Fed policy announcement, investors, economists and policymakers were on edge over how sharply the Fed would raise interest rates to deal with inflation, which hit a new peak in May.
"Financial market volatility and losses deepened on Tuesday, fueled by fears that the Fed continues to misjudge inflation and will come down too hard on the economy, prompting a recession. The S&P 500 has fallen into bear market territory — a 20% fall from the most recent high — and all the indices have accelerated losses for the year."
Inflation, not LGBT is the problem. And things will get worse for Democrats.
The bear market in stock exchanges reflects companies hunkering down for a recession.
Democrats will reap this fall what they sowed last summer with overspending and inattention to a supply chain that is still jammed as the ports in California cannot unload boats fast enough.
On Tuesday, Democrats lost a special election in Texas, as Republican Mayra Flores flipped a seat in the once-heavily Democrat 34th congressional district. It is 84% Hispanic.
Real Clear Politics already gives Republicans control of the House, as RCP lists 223 seats Republican, 180 Democrat and the remaining 32 tossups. Only 4 of those tossups are Republican.
Which brings me to gaytriotism.
AFP reported, "Biden fires culture war salvo with big LGBTQ celebration."
The story said, "Just ahead of the bash, Biden signed an executive order aimed at providing federal support on a variety of rights in the LGBTQ community that the White House sees as under attack from Republican state-level leaders -- especially in Florida, where potential presidential candidate Governor Ron DeSantis has put combating woke culture at the heart of his agenda."
So Biden is going after DeSantis for not allowing him and Disney to groom kindergarteners into the LGBT cause.
And grooming is the correct word because one in five young adults now identifies as LGBT. Changing one's sex is the cool thing now thanks to indoctrination in schools.
AFP had to admit gaytriotism won't save Democrats.
The news service said, "Biden is targeting an important layer of the Democratic voter base ahead of midterm elections where Republicans are widely seen as on track to win back control of Congress.
"For Republicans, the issue is equally potent, with activists accusing Democrats of moving too far to the left, especially on transgender rights.
"The standard bearer on the right is DeSantis, seen by many as a natural heir to former president Donald Trump's populist brand in the 2024 presidential election.
"In March, he signed a controversial law banning lessons on sexual orientation and gender identity in Florida elementary schools, a step some Republicans say protects young children from what they term indoctrination. Biden and other critics say it will hurt the LGBTQ community and stoke bullying."
Americans are divided on LGBT.
But Americans are united on $5 gasoline and $5 ground beef. They oppose it.
Democrats are doomed. |
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| To: J.B.C. who wrote (110900) | 6/15/2022 6:45:23 PM | | From: J.B.C. | | | | 
Can Republicans Save the Middle Class?
A certain kind of rich man’s policies and hobbies are a bulldozer rolling over the poor.
By Anthony Esolen
June 14, 2022
Right now, Americans are experiencing the dire effects of the most regressive and unjust tax of all: government-engineered and government-fueled inflation. Let us consider the matter. What is an extra $50 at the gas tank to the rich man? He can absorb the loss. What if a box of cookies at Walmart costs $5 instead of $2? He doesn’t go there anyway. Why, he can offset the extra expense of the high price of oil, which becomes the extra expense of everything else either made of oil or delivered by oil or gasoline, by eating at home a little more often than at his favorite restaurant.
I am exaggerating a little, I know, but you get the point. People need food, shelter, clothing, and the means to get around to do their work, and they need the work, too, work that will permit a man to support his wife and children, so that home and not the workplace, the street and the neighborhood and not the highway and the strip mall, will be the center of human activity. Everything that makes it more expensive for ordinary people to obtain those ordinary goods is, if government policy is behind it, a tax on the working class and the middle class, and it hurts the most vulnerable among us the worst.
The principle is easy to grasp. The rich man eats no more than the poor man. The rich man’s body needs to be kept no warmer in the winter than the poor man’s body. The rich man is probably less likely than the poor man to have to drive a few hundred miles a week.
The Democrats, when my father was young, used to be, as he told me, “for the little guy,” but that has not been reliably true since they gave the black ball to the littlest guy of all, our brother in the womb, and it has not been true at all since the party has cast its lot with the social and ideological hobbies of certain of the rich.
The old jest, that an environmentalist is someone who already has his summer home in the mountains of Colorado, is revealing in its unwittingly Marxist way. For Karl Marx, that great stopped clock in the history of ideas, did understand that, in general, rich people will pursue policies that keep them rich and eliminate the threat of being overtaken from below. The environmentalism that drives up the price of oil is a rich man’s hobby, as the feminism that has helped to drive the skilled trades from our schools (because boys mostly profit by them) is a rich woman’s hobby. The WNBA, indeed, is a rich man’s hobby for sort-of-rich women, as it is financed mainly by the NBA. I can think of plenty of uses for that money that would be far more profitable for basketball-playing boys in our dysfunctional cities.
Far be it from me to tell rich people to give up their hobbies. If the NBA wants to finance the WNBA, it’s scarcely any business of mine. But when hobbies become cultural imperatives, or legal directives, then they are everyone’s business. Then we must ask what the imperatives and directives do for the common good, or, often, whether they tend to harm or ruin the common good.
A party that genuinely cares for the poor will keep its eye on the ordinary goods of human life, and it will attempt to foster conditions that enable the poor to secure those goods at the least cost, by their own initiative, with as little interference from third parties as possible. That does not mean low-cost daycare and food stamps. It means, with few exceptions, no needfor daycare and no need for food stamps.
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These conditions are not only legal. It is, after all, quite possible by law and in theory for a poor family in the United States to scratch its way into security by hard work, much self-denial, and the practice of prudential virtues now held in scorn, such as, most obviously, not getting into bed with somebody before you are married and ready to have a child. But the whole cultural environment has been corrupted, including by church leaders—who know whose pockets are deep—mostly going along with good cheer. And the economic environment is now perfectly dreadful.
If the Republicans could hold a thought in their heads for more than a few seconds, they might see an opening, a political shift that would flip the parties for many decades to come. They might, for example, steal a page from the playbook of the much-loathed Franklin Roosevelt. When you drive down the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, you will see one handsome bridge after another, no two the same, built by men hired by the Works Progress Administration, men who had the skills to do that work but who had no one to hire them, or, and this is really my point here, boys who did not yet have the skills but came to learn them in the doing. The latter made up the main force of the Civilian Conservation Corps. The idea was to get young men out of the vice-ridden slums and put them to work outdoors, hardening their muscles and freshening their hearts, and teaching them how to use tools they had never used before, perhaps had never held or seen before. The idea was, of course, that a young man could go from the CCC into gainful employment elsewhere—why, almost anywhere.
Now, a WPA or a CCC will degenerate into a bloated make-work program riddled with political correctness, unless we keep clear in our minds what we are aiming for: working-class families, secure in their homes, with married parents and no need for both to be outside of the home. And that can only be the case if, again, the ordinary commodities of human life are easy and cheap to secure. And that can only be the case, in the world as it now is, if fuel is cheap. You cannot, right now, be an advocate for the poor all while you pursue policies that make it a hardship for them to heat their homes, fill their bellies, and drive to work, or work at all.
You must make a choice.
Likewise, you cannot be an advocate for the poor all while you pursue cultural directives that make it less and less likely—that will, rather, require a kind of herculean commitment to virtues that are mocked on all sides—for the working-class boy and girl to meet, to fall in love, to marry, and to have children in rather than out of wedlock, and to keep their vows to one another through the hard times that come to all of us, and to the poor most frequently and urgently.
You can fly the rainbow flag, you can flood the minds of young people with porn, and you can at the same time advocate policies that pour public funds into the lives of the poor, but you will be like people who punch holes in someone’s tank while giving them bottled water instead. If diabetes could be communicated, you would be like someone with such a heart for diabetics, you pursue policies that make as many diabetics as possible, while you feed them some good food and a lot of cookies, so that they never do get free of the disease. You can hold on to your sexual nihilism, or you can work for the poor, but you cannot do both at once.
You must choose.
Do I think the Republicans will seize the opening? I have no idea. We could have cheap fuel again. We could have intact families again, too, and not just for professionals. We could encourage more work that does not require a college degree. We could encourage cultural practices that keep the cost of housing low. We could—there is nothing in the universe that forbids it. For most of our expenses are self-imposed, self-inflicted.
You can’t turn back the clock? Wrong metaphor. A certain kind of rich man’s policies and hobbies are a bulldozer rolling over the poor. You can tell him to get the heck out of the bulldozer. If he won’t, you can shoot a political hole in his tank, so that the bulldozer comes to a stop whether he likes it or not. |
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